Doc: The answer to diminishing football head injuries could lie inside this helmet

Bob Harty, 63, patented the NekProtek, a lightweight, high-density foam flap that attaches to a football helmet. Now, he's working on designing a football helmet to include a cooling element.(Photo: Provided)

He’d be the first to see the kids with the neck injuries after they’d fallen from their bikes. The worst were the kids who’d fallen backward. Not even their helmets could protect them.

In 23 years as a paramedic in Chicago, Bob Harty saw lots of cervical spine injuries. Bicyclists, hockey players, football players. All the injured wore helmets and all the helmets had one thing in common: None protected the back of the neck, the cervical spine or the brain stem. Take a look at a helmet, almost any helmet, and you will see where its protection stops and trouble begins.

Harty noticed something else, too. When he’d respond to a serious injury to a high school football player, he’d gently remove the player’s helmet and be surprised to see the player’s head drenched in sweat, even when the weather turned cold. The hard plastic helmet offered no cooling ventilation.

To be a medic, Harty had to learn some medicine. One thing he learned was, heat swells the brain. Heat moves the brain closer to the skull. Head injuries happen when the brain bangs against the skull. What if we could keep heads cooler within the helmet?

This is science and science can be boring. But when your child suffers a head injury playing a sport – or, worst case, your husband/father/son is concussed repeatedly and contracts CTE – science becomes all that matters.

The current football helmet is the result of imperfect science. It might look invincible. It certainly can give its wearers a feeling of invincibility. “The Superman syndrome,’’ Harty calls it. But it doesn’t completely protect its wearer from traumatic head injuries.

The first product Harty, 63, patented he called NekProtek. It’s nothing more than a lightweight, high-density foam flap that attaches to an existing helmet and protects the back of the neck and the base of the skull the way a helmet protects the top of the head. “Logical, common-sense stuff,’’ he says.

Harty took it further in designing a football helmet to include the cooling element. He thinks it could revolutionize the safety of the game.

The prototype looks more like science fiction than science. It is soft and dotted with 50 to 60 gel capsules 1 ¼-inch wide and ¾-inch thick, each surrounded by vents the size of a pencil eraser. The capsules are cooled to 45 degrees. This, Harty says, accomplishes two vital ends: The capsules absorb the shock of a hit, and they keep the brain cool.

The patent says the soft helmet can be used as a liner or as a helmet itself. To look at its softness and dotted surface is to think this helmet couldn’t stop a well-aimed toothpick, let alone a 260-pound linebacker. As Harty says, “The perception is that something this soft isn’t going to protect me.’’

But he has the science as proof. Bear with him.

“Helmets now are designed to protect from skull fracture,’’ Harty says. “The chances of that happening in football are slim. The cranium is the second-hardest bone in the body,’’ behind the fibula. “You’re most vulnerable in the back of the neck.’’

Harty says current helmets disperse the energy of a head hit, to the entire brain. The gel caps limit it to the area contacted. The cooling aspect will keep the brain from expanding closer to the skull. As the gel caps lose their cooling power, helmets would be changed out for fresh ones, already chilling in a cooler.

Harty adds that the gel caps can withstand the force of a hockey puck at 100 mph. Sound crazy?

Not to 18 major-college football programs. Clemson has expressed interest, as have Penn State and Kansas. Harty says Texas A&M wants the finished product as soon as it’s ready. The chairman of the NHL’s head injury committee has said she will take a look.

Harty also has the support of pre-eminent neurosurgeons Dr. Julian Bailes and Dr. Robert Cantu, each an expert in the field of concussions, each active in the ongoing research of CTE in NFL players.

Harty believes colleges would start by testing his helmet in summer practice. If they liked it, they’d wear it in games and, at some point, Harty could pitch the helmet to high schools and youth leagues. Ideally, he’d reach a licensing agreement with a major helmet maker such as Riddell. One problem: Riddell hasn’t returned his calls.

The goal is to find investors and mass-produce the helmet to sell for $100 or so.

“I want the single mom driving her son to football practice to be able to afford this helmet,’’ he said.

Great inventions come from people who aren’t afraid to try. Harty’s grandfather worked for Boeing. He invented the flight simulator and the autopilot. He never went to college. Harty himself never finished college. He has patented 15 products in the past 20 years, mostly in the medical field. “I think of things, put ‘em on a napkin and call my patent attorney,’’ he explains.

Doers are dreamers who’ve been given a chance. Bob Harty says the head-injury scourge in football can be diminished. He believes he has the product to make that happen. All that remains is the chance. What does football have to lose?